"A" is for "Anthology"

Hello, everybody and welcome to my very first entry in Tonia Brown’s 26 Week Blog Challenge!

Yay!

So, Tonia is a friend (it must be noted: a crazy friend) and she proposed a challenge for as many people as wanted to participate that we blog a minimum of 500 words once a week, starting February 1, for 26 weeks.  And, as you may have guessed, each entry is supposed to correspond to a letter in the Roman alphabet.

This week, being the first week, and the first of weeks being, the subject is “A.”  I pondered discussing Henry Winkler saying, “Eeeeeey” but aside from the fact that it happened, usually accompanied by a bang on a juke box, I don’t know anything else about that.  So instead I decided to choose “anthology.”

An anthology, friends, is a collection.  Actually, I have no idea what it is.  Hang on, let me go look it up on Wiktionary.  Okay, yes, a collection, specifically of literary works such as poems or short stories.  So it’s pretty much exactly what I thought it was, but I wanted to make sure I was saying the right thing instead of just sticking my foot in my mouth.

So, by extension, something like “The Twilight Zone” or “Tales From the Crypt” is an anthology television series – one, where, instead of following the same characters each week, each episode serves as a standalone, like a short story.  Often the stories of an anthology series are adapted from short stories.  It’s the same for a film, like “Cat’s Eye” or “Creepshow.”

Speaking of which, those have really fallen out of favor, haven’t they?  Can anyone think of an anthology movie that’s come out in the last, let’s say, ten years?  I mean, I’m sure there are a few obscure ones, but nothing major comes to mind.  I feel like all the big ones were in the ‘70s and ‘80s.  Well, tastes change I guess.

As long as we’re on the subject of anthologies, let’s talk about one of my favorites (and not just because I’m featured in it, but, yes, mostly just because I’m featured in it): AT HELL’S GATES!  The AT HELL’S GATES series started as the brainchild of horror authors Devan Sagliani and Shana Festa.  In Shana’s writing group we were discussing ways to boost our visibility as individuals.

One suggestion was to release a pack of novels, say a dozen, which has been a method that has been getting a lot of attention, both for good and ill, in the writing world recently.  The up side is, a reader gets 12 novels for $0.99.  The downside is the author is getting paid around $0.04 for each purchase of their novel, just slightly lower than Big 5 royalty rates.  (Zing!)

Anyway, we finally settled on a short story collection, and we decided to donate all of the proceeds to the Intrepid Fallen Heroes Fund because, to be quite frank, The Wounded Warriors Project is run by a bunch of crooked fucks who don’t give their money to veterans.  The IFHF is much more honest.

So why not check it out?  The first and second volumes are out now!  Click the pictures for purchase links.